The present invention relates to pontoon boats and, more specifically, to pontoon boats that may be collapsed into smaller sizes for storage and transportation.
Pontoons boats are quite commonly used for leisure. Typically, such boats employ a deck generally disposed between a pair of buoyant hull members such as pontoons. The deck area is preferably constructed as large as possible to provide optimum accommodation for people and/or equipment. Desired length of the boats can generally be accommodated as needed.
However, if the boat must be transported on the highway, the magnitude of the width can be limited by vehicle width limits for legal transportation on the road. In addition, although the weight of the boat is typically quite modest, the length and width dimensions of the boat can require a fairly large-dimension trailer. Typically, especially with respect to pleasure boats, vehicle width limits on the roads operate as a functional limit of the widths to which such boats are built.
Even given the above criteria regarding width limits of vehicles on roads, pontoon boats typically require use of trailers specially designed for pontoon boats, which makes such trailers especially costly, and of limited use. Accordingly, one common practice is for a pontoon boat owner to not purchase a trailer for the boat, but to rely on marina service organizations or other service operators to trailer the boat to a launch location at the beginning of a boating season and to remove the boat from the water when the boating season is over. As a result, use of the pontoon boat commonly may be limited to a single body of water in a given season. Further, since the boat is left in the water the entire season, plant life such as algae or mussels readily attach themselves to the vessel thereby hindering speed of the boat, and adding to the periodic task of cleaning the hull e.g. at the end of the boating season.
Efforts have been made to make transport of pontoon boats easier. For instance, Smidt, U.S. Pat. No. 6,095,079, discusses a folding pontoon boat. However, the boat is not a full size pontoon boat and cannot adequately support more than two people. Still, the boat must be transported behind another vehicle. Other boats, such as Pruonto, U.S. Pat. No. 4,562,786, can be disassembled for storage in a smaller area. However, there are many sections and parts that must be reassembled, which makes such actions more cumbersome than desired. Reassembly is not the most efficient process, as each of the deck sections requires border sections that must be fastened between each deck section.
Foldable pontoon boats, such as Jackson, U.S. Pat. No. 6,564,735, Little, U.S. Pat. No. 6,067,925, and Valliere, U.S. Pat. No. 6,003,458, have been contemplated in the prior art. While these boats reduce the storage and transportation space needed, there is still room for improvement. Most specifically, these boats still are transported by being pulled by a vehicle on a trailer. Thus, it would be advantageous to develop a full-size pontoon boat that can be easily and quickly collapsed and reassembled when necessary. Further, it would be advantageous that such a boat could be stored and transported without the need of a trailer or a similar vehicle, and would not require that the boat be towed by a vehicle. An ideal boat would balance the ability to disassembly the pontoon boat to a sufficient storable size so that it could be easily transportable without necessarily using a boat trailer, while allowing for the boat to be easily and quickly reassembled when being use.